UESPWiki:Copyright and Ownership

The content of UESP is licensed freely under the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License (also called the by-sa license). This means that you retain ownership of any contribution you submit to us, but you permanently license the right to use it to this site. The by-sa license is a copyleft license, meaning the text of the articles can be copied, modified, and redistributed as long as the new version acknowledges the authors of the article and grants the same freedoms to others.

Secondly, there is the control of the site. As it is said below the "Save Page" button of every page, you allow all of your contributions to UESPWiki to be edited, altered, or removed by the community. If you don't want your writing to be edited, then you do not need to submit it here. Therefore, the community of UESP has the authority and control over most of the content on UESP. There are certain pages, however, that only the administrators have control of.

Image Copyright

Copyright information must be added to the image description of every image. The copyright for individual components of screenshots from Bethesda's games belongs to them, but copyright for the overall composition rests with the image creator, and is licensed to UESP, as with textual content. The copyright for company logos belongs to those companies, but we are allowed to host them under United States law's "fair use" doctrine. Other pictures should be available under the by-sa license or in the public domain. Any images that violate copyright are subject to deletion.

Using Materials from UESP

If you want to use content from this site, you can do so, but you must follow the by-sa license. This entails the following:

Your materials in turn must be licensed under our by-sa license.

You must give attribution to the article from which the content was taken.

You must give access to the page where the content was used.

You may fulfill the last two obligations by directly linking back to the article hosted on the site as well as the history page of the article. For example, if you were to use the article "Felsaad Coast" from our site, an example notice might read as follows:

This article is licensed under the <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/">​Creative Commons by-sa license</a>. It uses material from the UESP article <a href="http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Bloodmoon:Felsaad_Coast">​"Bloodmoon:Felsaad Coast"</a>.

In the event that you find a page or site where the above steps have not been taken, please post something on the Administrator Noticeboard to let our administrators know of the situation, even if it has already been resolved. You may also politely inform the offender about the nature of the copyrighted images, however, due to the legal nature of copyright, it may be best to allow an administrator or other senior editor handle it.